Professor Harsha Ram’s paper primarily focuses on the poetics, the literary theory, and the politics surrounding the Russian Revolution, and how the particular “convergence of literature and politics can help rethink the problem of world literature.” Focal to Ram’s research are poet Velimir Khlebnikov and artist Vladimir Tatlin, whose unconventional work presented a utopia imbued with a new vision of geopolitics.

On December 9th, 2016, please join the Jordan Center and NYU Russian and Slavic Department for a panel discussion entitled, “Falling Lenins: Decommunization in Ukraine through the Lens of Art,” with multimedia artists Anna Jermolaewa and Vova Vorotniov, art historian, activist and journalist, Asia Bazdryieva, and historian Kateryna Ruban. The panel will be moderated by Natasha Bluth, MA Candidate in Journalism and Russian and Slavic Studies at NYU.

On Sept. 18, 2015, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia welcomed Mark Konecny, Associate Director and Curator of the archives and library of the Institute of Modern Russian Culture, for the first installment of its Colloquium Series. During the event, titled “The Creation of a Market for Russian Art in America,” Konecny talked about his most recent endeavors: an exhibition of Russian artists who participated in the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and the establishment of a related digital humanities project.

On April 24th, 2015, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, together with the university’s Department of Comparative Literature, the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, the Office of the Dean for Humanities, as well as the Romanian Cultural Institute inNew York, held an all-day symposium entitled “Re-Mediating the Archive: Image, Word, Performance” organized by NYU’s PhD candidate in Comparative Literature Emma Hamilton and Professor of Comparative Literature Cristina Vatulescu. The symposium welcomed seven participants from various fields who, as Vatulescu pointed out in her introduction, were there to address “the coming together of texts, images, and bodies in the archive.” She also added that currently “archival re-mediation is in full swing,” with new scholarship posing the question of the role of media and images in the long textually-dominated archive and attempting to bring other media out of persistent blind spots. She referred to this recent development as a new archival revolution, and invited dialogue with other archival revolutions, such as that prompted by the emergence of film as a medium at the turn of the 20th century and the one following the fall of the Iron Curtain 25 years ago.

On October 10, 2014, the Jordan Center welcomed Stephen Norris, a professor of history at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University of Ohio, to speak about his book project, entitled “Communist Cartoonist: Boris Efimov.” Norris’s talk was second in the Jordan Center’s Colloquium Series, which, as Director Yanni Kotsonis explained, encourages scholars to present their ongoing projects in order to receive feedback and comments from the audience.

About the Center

The Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia was established in 2011 thanks to a generous gift from the family of NYU alumni Boris and Elizabeth Jordan. The mission of the Center is to make Russia intrinsic to all aspects of scholarly investigation: from history to visual culture, literature to economics, anthropology to politics.